Archive for the ‘Interaction Design’ Category

Just arrived at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct for the VSMM conference, the program committee of which has kindly consented to display my poster about the design of collaborative place. I bumped into the most excellent and prolific Eric Champion on the airtrain, so I’m in good company

My first task on arrival was to whack up the poster, and the second was to get online through QUT’s wifi. This turned out to be an absurd and tortuous process involving the generation of a unique password for me, the installation of a VPN client, a web gateway, two clickthrough legal agreements that I didn’t read, a password change and a re-login. Thank Drokk I’m not on Windows or it would have required a reboot as well. The lovely people at the registration desk made me my initial login and presented me with instructions – VSMM made it as painless as possible, it’s QUT that is the villain of this piece. This is after all the Creative Industries Precinct, the denizens of which are supposed to be inventing the cyberspace of the future right here and now. How they are to do it with one foot in a bucket of concrete baffles me.

I’m finally happy enough with my first literature review to call it done – so, here it is. I’m new to this kind of writing and to the field, so I’ll leave the comments thread open on this post; any feedback is good.

Terra Nova is talking about the feeling of space in different virtual worlds. The discussion focuses on things like camera tracking and proprioception, which makes me think of the papers on embodiment in CVEs that I’ve been reading recently.

However embodiment is used in a couple of ways in the literature. Sometimes it describes the feeling of being in a body, interacting with the virtual space. This is where you can start to think of the avatar as if it were an animal within an environment, and that’s how the term is relevant to the discussion above.

At other times it’s used to describe a user’s avatar as perceived by others in the space. The distinction is: how it feels to be in your (virtual) self vs. how your (virtual) self appears to others. These are so far apart that to call them both “embodiment” confuses me terribly. Is the term really meant to cover both of those things, and if so do we have words for each separately as well?